Month: June 2014

In my experience game development companies are much more impressed by what you have actually done, than what your paper qualifications suggest you are capable of.

Artists within the games industry understand this. Rather that present a shiny certificate of artist-talent, they compile a portfolio of work. This portfolio is the essential tool in getting recruited. A senior artist will flick through the work and see instantly what the artist's strengths and weaknesses are.

When engineers arrive from university, the interview process rapidly converges on any project work. What was the project? Is this work applicable to games technologies? Can we see your source code? This matters more than grades.

I'd strongly advice any engineer wishing to enter the games industry to compile a portfolio of some kind. A collection of programming projects which illustrate the sort of talents and interests they have. It could be running code, video captures. Attach source code, and make it clear what you have written and what was taken from elsewhere.

Within games, programmers tend to specialise. There are specialists who work on graphics, physics, game-play, user-interface, tools and so on.

An individual who shows up saying, I want to be an X-specialist. Look at these examples of X, I wrote, will be given a great deal of consideration. In most cases, someone with an excellent portfolio will be given more consideration than someone with an excellent paper qualification, but no portfolio.

Say, you think that your rig is strong enough to run most games above 120 FPS, pushing the game graphics settings to the limit is way to go. Resolution, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, texture quality, shadow quality, water reflections, depth-of-field, motion blur, ambient occlusion, HDR, post processing, etc are some settings which can impact how good the game graphics can be. However, we as human never stop chasing perfection. We always try to climb the highest of the highest mountain as high as we can be. For the “graphics-phile” gamer, they also try to push the rig beyond their limit to achieve the unachievable graphics fidelity.

Okay, let’s drop the charade here.

Pursuit of Higher Fidelity Graphics

Say, you already set everything to ultra but you still see there are some edges (jagged, or worse) and try to achieve something more, what else can you do? We know that we already have a lot of anti-aliasing algorithm to reduce (if not eliminate) jagged edges, from the cheapest like multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA), propietary tech like NVIDIA FXAA, TXAA – AMD MLAA, and the most powerful one: Supersampling (SSAA).

Supersampling is the best anti-aliasing ever. Rather than approximate each vertex intersection, SSAA brute-force applies anti-aliasing to every, single, pixel in the framebuffer.The end result is smoother edges and more beautiful graphics with the cost of very, very demanding performance (every brute-force algorithm is very demanding). That’s why many games opt-out the SSAA method and choose a more considerable approach like MSAA/TXAA.

However, since you can already push the rig to the limit, why don’t developer let you to do the SSAA?